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The read-write web
'' '''''the read-write web Essay . No. 1 1392-02-01 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “product”—a compilation of the best material I could find. Itwas a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do as the toolsbecome more sophisticated, but it worked. My main focus in this book is on what happens when people at the edges participate in the news-gathering and dissemination processes. Of course, I have to remind myself that most people will remain—and I dislike this word—''consumers ''of news. Yet even if that’s all they do, they can do it better than at any time in history because technology gives them more choices. (This is one reason why significant numbers of Americans, believing they weren’t getting a fair perspective from the U.S. media, sought out international views during the 2004 Iraq War and run-up to it.) The news is what we make of it, in more ways than one. To understand the evolution of tomorrow’s news, we need to understand the technologies that are making it possible. The tools of tomorrow’s participatory journalism are evolving quickly—so quickly that by the time this book is in print, new ones will have arrived. This book’s accompanying web site (''http://wethemedia.oreilly.com) will catalogue new tools as they become available. In this chapter, we’ll look more generically at the fundamental technologies. For people who simply want to be better informed, the Internet itself is the key. We have access to a broader variety of current information than ever before, and we can use it with increasing sophistication. For those who want to join the process, the Web is where we merely start. The tools of grassroots journalism run the gamut from the simplest email list, in which everyone on the list receives copies of all messages; to weblogs, journals written in reverse chronological order; to sophisticated content-management systems used for publishing content to the Web; and to syndication tools that we the media allow anyone to subscribe to anyone else’s content. The tools also include handheld devices such as camera-equipped mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). What they have in common is a reliance on the contributions of individuals to a larger whole, rising from the bottom up. It boils down to this. In the past 150 years we’ve essentially had two distinct means of communication: one-to-many (books, newspapers, radio, and TV) and one-to-one (letters, telegraph, and telephone). The Internet, for the first time, gives us many-to-many and few-to-few communications. This has vast implications for the former audience and for the producers of news because the differences between the two are becoming harder to distinguish. That this could happen in media is no surprise, given the relatively open nature of the tools, which could be used in ways the designers didn’t anticipate. It’s always been this way in media; every new medium has surprised its inventors in one way or another. At their heart, the technologies of tomorrow’s news are fueling something emergent—a conversation in which the grassroots\ are absolutely essential. Steven Johnson, author of ''Emergence ''—a book about how rich, complex systems such as ant colonies come to exist—explained it this way in a 2002 O’Reilly Network interview: Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts...And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up. In no sphere is the whole more intelligent than the sum of its parts than in digital networks, where the basic units are zeros and ones—and where, as David Isenberg explained in his pathbreaking 1997 paper, “Rise of the Stupid Network,” the value soars when you move the intelligence to the edges and away from the center. The Internet, in particular, is becoming the environment in which the new tools function, an ecosystem that is gaining strength from diversity. The Web, as it grew up in the 1990s, was a powerful publishing system that journalists of all kinds used to great effect, and still do. But the larger toolkit is part of an expanding, thriving ecosystem..